Category: Carlyn Yandle

The nodes know

1/30/2026

Hope empowers quirky denim objects

I’ve had this exchange a few times this past week:
You’re so busy. What are you working on?
Uh… hard to say.

It’s hard to put into words this curious crafty endurance with a deadline. Better to just hold up my needle-scarred fingers and gnarled hands. Hand-work stuff. For exhibition.

I have only myself to blame for spending these glorious foggy-sunny mid-winter days indoors cutting out seams and waistbands from discarded jeans and stitching them into quirky little coils and nodes. But they want to emerge, like characters in a novel that surprise even the author. They want to sprout like spores out of a knotted network of denim created back in the months before the global pandemic lockdown.

Resurge started as a compulsion during the first tempestuous Trump administration and soon after the release of an alarming report on climate change and rising sea levels. I fell into a daily rhythm of knotting and braiding a pile of discarded jeans, for the simple satisfaction of bringing new life to this particular abject material. The work revealed itself as a ground-zero eruption, an unstructured sprawl of frayed tendrils and rivulets of global brand logos in a very West Coast marine palette.

But now Resurge wants to rise above its heaviness, no longer limited to the floor but installed at a vantage point that suggests topography: a whole new world.

I didn’t overthink the urge to needle up a population of nodes to insert into a tumultuous water-scape. Instead I’m immersed in the material and the method, allowing the swirl of ideas and responses from local and global realities to infuse and entangle. The making is irrepressible, eclipsing my weekly writing time, as I make one benign conical object after another. Soon — hopefully — a critical mass will emerge that must be reckoned with.

In 2019, this slippery, shapeless sea of knots held space for more layers of meaning. In 2026 Resurge offers regrowth and resilience, from the fracture. I hope it will resonate in these perilous times.

(Cross-posted at https://carlynyandle.substack.com/)

UNRAVEL, Mixed media works by Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki, Amanda Wood and Carlyn Yandle runs from Feb. 3 - March 14, 2026 at Seymour Art Gallery, Deep Cove, B.C. Reception: Sunday, Feb. 8, 2 - 4 p.m.; “From Conversation to Practice” Program with Amanda Wood, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2 p.m.; “Hearth” social stitching event with Carlyn Yandle, Sunday, March 1, from 2 p.m.; artist talk with Tatiana Mirkov-Popovicki, Sunday March 8, 11 a.m.

From break to breakthrough

1/21/2026

Making space for the creative process, at home or away

The following is a public service announcement for all those cowering from the liquid gunmetal-grey skies on this bone-chilling coast: Crank up the Vitamin D. We need 800-1000 IUs per day so pop a supplement or a teaspoon of cod liver oil, or eat wild salmon (600-1000 per 100 g or 3.5 oz.) regularly. Do it for your bones and teeth. For vegans it’s a bit trickier but here’s a fun fact: mushrooms, the only produce that contains Vitamin D, can generate a goodly dose when they’ve been exposed to sun or sunlamps — just like peoples — so feast on some UV-ray-enhanced mushrooms. Lecture over.

When other mushrooms are threatening to colonize the dark corners of my mind and between my toes, when the skies are as grey and shapeless as my sweatpants, I see these as signs that it’s time to let my skin generate some Vitamin D. I joined the throng of half of all Canadians taking winter breaks this year, with the largest percentage (30%) descending on Mexico and the Caribbean. Puerto Vallarta, just a five-hour flight south on this same west coast of North America, is lousy with Canuckleheads this year.

I am not doing my country proud with my weak attempts to converse with the locals. Asking questions in that lovely romance language leads to answers I can’t understand so I tend to stick with agreement statements like Aquí hay mucho pollos asados. (“There are many roasted chickens here”). This is maybe why (or because) I spend most of the hot, sunny hours in the rental apartment pursuing my digital-nomad dream of making stuff and writing about it wherever I go.

It never works out as planned though I pack with the best intentions. My carry-on contains the usual bag of tricks: white linen cloth; a colourful selection of embroidery floss and hoop; two sashiko sewing needles (they always get through security screening); small containers of red, white, yellow and blue acrylic fluid; two thin paintbrushes; sketchbook and assorted black brush-pens.

A supplies kit for a mobile studio: paints, brushes, pens, linen, hoop in a dedicated toiletries bag. (Carlyn Yandle)

Once I’m settled in the rental unit I set up my art supplies. I feel sort of obliged to artistically-render the luscious plants and birds, beaches and sunsets out there but I’m not really into it even if they do turn out which they rarely do. My overwrought sketches of philodendron leaves look like a waste pile of vein-y heart organs. I’m baffled at how to depict the papery folds of bougainvillia blossoms even when I try copying some online examples by other artists. The whole exercise is as onerous as Grade 6 map-colouring which also left me bad-tempered and bored. In the end, as it often happens, the paintbrush rag is more interesting than my tortured attempts.

The paintbrush rag holds more interest than the painting. (Carlyn Yandle)

It’s a wadded-up piece of two-ply paper towel from a roll I found under the sink but the paint has diffused in a way that reminds me of the surf or the jungly mountains above the Old Town so when it’s dry I smooth it out and pull apart the two bound layers into two translucent mirror images. I know these would be even more translucent if they were brushed onto a wood panel with acrylic medium and coated with a waxy finish.

I rummage around the kitchen and locate a glass baking dish and fill it with water to soak another half sheet from the paper-towel roll then lay each soaked sheet out on a glass shelf I removed from the refrigerator — this is the danger of renting your holiday home to artists — then drop or brush on different diluted mixed colours, adding some patterns here and there with the water-based brush pens. Soon I am as absorbed in this material exploration as the paint blooming in the soaked fibres. I set each swatch out on more paper towels to dry and when I run out of all horizontal surfaces I string them up like laundry lines across the open window frames and between chairs, laying down even more paper on the floor to catch the drips.

Experiments with different paint applications on paper towel.

There are no photos of that creative process here. I normally make a point of posting photo-documentation but on the outside chance that the condo owner might see their vacation unit turned into a chaotic printmaking factory, that image is left up to the imagination.

A collection of tissue swatches for future consideration (Carlyn Yandle)

Now back home in this fresh, green coastal city on the foggy edge of a temperate rainforest my brain is still humming with ideas for collaging those test tissues as backgrounds for sketches of patterns captured in morning and evening walks through the streets of the Old Town.

Patterns from the streets of Puerto Vallarta’s Old Town, Mexico (Carlyn Yandle)

That stack of painted papers holds the creative energy for a new artwork series: the best souvenir of any travels.

Originally posted on Substack, Jan. 11, 2026

Fibre artwork drowning in metaphors

12/14/2025

As of this writing, those living or working on 500 properties just 60 kilometres away have been ordered to seek dry land. Those on another 1,000 properties are being told to be ready for word to flee the “slow-moving tsunami” from another flooded river south of the border. This is on the heels of a disaster in the same area four years ago due to an atmospheric river that was “about 60 per cent more likely to happen due to climate change.”
Like the waterlogged lands, this news is too much to absorb. “Atmospheric river” — an intense, narrow plume of water vapour that can transport a greater flux of water than the world’s largest river, the Amazon — didn’t exist as a term before the ’90s, never mind be associated with “climate change.” (That’s one of those banned words in the current US Administration’s Energy Department.)
It’s impossible to ignore these several-thousand-kilometres-long plumes, even outside the flood-risk zones. The rain pelts my windows as I tap away on my laptop. It bounces off and pools up all horizontal surfaces. It seeps through the studio skylight no matter how many times the maintenance guy caulks up the seams. And in this watery part of the world we’re in it for the long haul.

Water always finds its way and in this soggy space that includes artwork, sometimes even intentionally. Drip By Drip was conceived with water on the brain. I started by mixing up an acrylic paint wash of just the blueish Payne’s Grey to dye various found linens in spontaneous patterns. Later I ripped those pieces to expose the frays of warp and weft, then combined these uniform swatches into new patterns.

I tacked a few of these squares on the wall in a row using a single sewing pin for each one, then added lapping rows above to cover each pin that in turn scalloped the bottom edge. This lapping, staggered construction was likely borne from the muscle memory of hand-nailing cedar shingles on all sides of a Gulf Island cabin one parched summer because using the generator risked sparking a ground fire. That lengthy, repetitive work in the hot sun opened up time to notice how the straight, grooved woodgrain was easy to split and nail, and to reflect on how any future repairs would only require replacing a shingle or two. I thought about how that straight grain and flanged edges would slough off the much-needed rain and how it would repel water even better if this was the oil-rich old-growth red cedar used for thousands of years by the Coast Salish peoples in this region to build shed-roof plank lelum̓ (houses).

Sketches from Architecture of the Salish Sea Tribes of the Pacific Northwest Shed Roof Plank Houses by Christina Wallace (2017) and Cedar by Hilary Stewart (1984)

I still think a lot about how that long history of best construction practices seen in some of the largest lelum̓ in North America before European contact might be used today, and the hubris in trying to beat back the forces of nature through short-term fixes or just pretend it’s all a green energy scam.
Drip By Drip has unlimited growth potential. It can be seen as an expanding painting practice or an artifact of the right-to-dye socials that went into making this frilly field of fibre. I see it as an ethereal shingled barrier in the futile gesture of trying to hold back the next climate calamity, pretty and pretty disturbing.

"Drip By Drip": An ever-growing ombré shingling of dyed found linens and sewing pins (Carlyn Yandle)

Quilting and connecting

9/7/2025

If you stitch it (in public) they will come

An artist-instructor friend advised me, as I was preparing my portfolio to apply to art school, that if I was planning to include images of my quilts and rag rugs and mosaic’d vessels, I should group these as Craft Use Objects.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it but the word ‘craft’ seemed to have a stink to it. And the fact that these items were for actual use (as opposed to useless?) was also a bit whiffy. I spent the following six years of fine-arts studies needling at the question, What’s the use of art?

I eventually found two good uses for creating exhibition-type paintings, sculptures, floorworks and fibre installations: making use of used, disused or misused materials instead of consuming new materials; and growing community through the gathering of those materials. I monkeyed around with job-site debris delivered by construction workers; broken toys from my sister’s kids and her friends’ kids; old embroidered linens, doilies and buttons from my mother’s friends and other artists; jeans from my brother and others; old paintings from my father; burlap coffee bags from the coffee-roaster; pennies from friends; and businessmen’s white linen shirts from, well, businessmen.

In the end it all boiled down to one three-word artist statement: Making is connecting. This is not an original idea and maybe a little obvious but it’s been my roadmap for creating ever since.

Which brings me to “Shatter”, the title of my latest virtually/almost/nearly finished not-at-all-stinky Craft Use Object. (After many decades of making quilts I’ve decided that any quilts that are not direct copies of a pattern, that have taken on a personality of their own, deserve a title just as much as Artwork.) This one has emerged as a field of shattered circles, a project that shatters any expectations for this quilt and this quilter. It also relates to the times of its making, November 2024 to June 2025 — need I say more? “Shatter” is a cozy, slightly chaotic project that embeds silks and satins gifted by friends, as well as hours of focus, frustration and endurance, all in the service of creating the many meanings of comfort.

Hand-quilting detail, Shatter quilt, 2025 (Carlyn Yandle)

The sunny, warm weather this past week made it possible to take “Shatter” to the park to spread out for a few hours of the victory lap in quilt-making: encasing the mess of batting and threads in a precise frame of binding through hand-stitching. We made it! And it’s square! -ish!

AN OUTDOOR TRADITION: When there’s no room indoors to spread out a queen-sized project, quilting is necessarily a seasonal activity. (Carlyn Yandle, 2003)

“Shatter” is an attention-getter. The pie-piece blocks of satin and gold top-stitching shimmer in the sun against the matte midnight-blue cotton background. It compelled some park visitors to comment as I bent over the binding. Nice quilt. I love quilts. Did you make this yourself? My grandmother was a quilter. I would love to learn to quilt. I found a great vintage quilt. Do you fix zippers? (Please stop asking me if I fix zippers.) By the end of the day “Shatter” was also the site of a long discussion with a friend broken up by her break-up. When all was said and done we stood up, hugged and I rolled up the quilt, the equivalent of seeing someone out of the office.
It remains rolled up, ready as another sunny, social setting or a cozy, tears-absorbent spot to stretch out on or curl up in.

MAKING IN PUBLIC: The neighbourhood park on a sunny, dry day is the perfect/only space for hand-stitching a large project.

Originally published on Substack earlier this summer.

The future is fungal

1/18/2025

Mushrooms and more for troubled times

When you spend a good portion of your winter cowering from the cold and the rain, it’s hard to fathom the fiery desert winds that are obliterating entire neighbourhoods just a three-hour flight south. In the near-real-time images and video only chimneys, mangled metal and concrete driveways hint at what used to be.

But then you notice the vestiges of palm trees, bougainvillea vines, laurel hedges, tufts of sisal and succulents. Before the last tendrils of smoke dissipate and the insurance battles begin, these plants hold the promise that buds and leaves will sprout and new colonizer species will emerge, boosted by an ashy soil. They are a reminder that whether it’s our perilous planet or our own contorting guts, flora heals.

This front line in ground recovery is below the surface, a mycelium network of fungal lace that can erupt in reproductive spores, most noticeably after wildfire as a bright orange carpet of tiny caplets.

Mapping entanglements: Crocheted cotton, acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)

Mycelium is all the rage these days, embraced for its regenerative properties. I may be a little disturbed by the tiny fungal ecosystem flourishing in a dark corner of my damp art studio, and mushrooms on my tongue may feel like phlegm balls, but I get excited at the news that mycelium is being explored to fight cancer cells and alleviate physical and psychological trauma.

The earth-sustaining potential of mycelium is unlimited: just one bus-ride away from my studio, at UBC’s Biogenic Architecture Lab, bricks and other building materials are being made from edible fungi like oyster-mushroom mycelium; the late actor Luke Perry’s final wish was to be wrapped up in mycelium embedded in a Mushroom Death Suit for his green burial. (And he was.)

Mapping entanglements II: acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)

Mycelium spores, unlike seeds, are resilient to toxic compounds, high temperatures, drought and radiation — food for thought as footage of those Los Angeles homes, typically composed of and containing a wide array of synthetic polymers, go up in poisonous, cancer-causing smoke.

Spore: Acrylic and mercerized cotton thread on found linen, 12”x 9” (Carlyn Yandle)

I see mycelium as a pattern for social regeneration after natural and unnatural disaster and scorched-earth policies. Its spreading network of tendrils mirrors our innate need to connect with one another, finding and nurturing our common ground despite divisive forces. Those thickening entanglements bring comfort and joy because we are pack animals. It is in our human nature to come together; we can see it right there in the aftermath of LA fires.

We may be on shaky ground but I can feel the rumblings as we emerge/erupt/bloom, mycelium-like, when the conditions call for fresh energy. Bloop! Bloop!

Time to find focus

1/4/2025

Depicting a distracted mind might not be helping

Disrupting the grid, upending predictable patterns. Acrylic on canvas, sewing pins, 24” x 24” (Carlyn Yandle)

If the person I share the bed with is to be believed, this morning (as of this writing) I announced in my sleep: “I’m sorry we’re going to martial law again.”

I have only a dim notion of what martial law entails. I’m also not sure if this ‘sorry’ is in the Canadian sense, as in “Sorry bus full” on the rush-hour B-Line that really means “Suck it up, buttercup.” Or is it regret that martial law is again here? In any event, I’m impressed that my id (if you’re a Freud follower) even has a notion of the word ‘sorry.’

I assumed this bit of sleep babble was a call to end this seasonal distraction or maybe our collective distractive state in general. I admit I am worried about my own eroding focus exacerbated by the commercially- and politically-corrupted internet. And I’m not alone; half of US adults are getting their newsbits on TikTok, part of the bombardment of unrelated snippets of (mis)information from maybe humans but increasingly AI.

Thoughts of doom-scrolling, pop-up ad windows, investment-building booms, Amazon fulfilment centres and faceless Cloud storage mega-facilities. Acrylic on canvas, 34” x 27” (Carlyn Yandle)

Over the years I have developed a near-obsessive way of working to evoke a seductive, unsettling visual field, somewhere between pretty and pretty distracting. This laborious process immerses the body in the subject while opening up time and space for the mind to consider some questions like: Are American reporters putting themselves in danger by exposing white supremacy groups? Is it safe to be trans in a small US town? Will women run the risk of more hate and harassment as the top trending phrases, “Your body, my choice” and “Get back to the kitchen” spread online? Is Canada the next alt-right nation? I’m concerned that as long as we’re preoccupied by our next Amazon orders to be fulfilled, or wasting hours killing foes in Call of Duty or dreaming of a career as an influencer, we’re not seeing some harsh political realities coming soon to a White House near you.

I wish I could be content to paint pastoral scenes or voluptuous florals that people would actually want hanging on their walls but this is where I’m at. I lose myself in this work of painting acrylic skins, slicing them into razor-sharp edges and right angles, then positioning them, layer after layer with tweezers and brayers, building and negating grids until my eyes start to cross and my back seizes up. And as the old song goes, I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I’m starting to think that my martial-law proclamation is directed at my own obsessiveness and toward good orderly direction. We’re all going to need that kind of focus in 2025.

From mind-numbing to mindful

9/30/2024

Dropping out is easy. This art practice is about tuning in

Flat on my back in the chair last week, the dentist had just plunged the second needle into my eroded molar area and her assistant was now affixing the rubber dam. This is when my go-to flight response kicked in: I'm not really here! I'm not really here! I'm not really here!

Full disassociation is appropriate when two dental professionals are bearing down on you with drill and suction tube and you are required to relax your gag reflex. But checking out of reality to avoid the pain of the Divided States of America’s Presidential election campaign is not the answer.

In this Disinformation Industrial Complex age it’s tempting to drop out and go on a bed-date with the vape pen to binge Love Is Blind. But we need to stay engaged — yes, even Canadians. We need to tune in to reliable sources of news,* turn on our own brains and hearts so we can discern the rational from the irrational and the hopeful from the hateful. And when the time comes (in any public election), we need to turn to voting our own conscience and not what others expect from us.

The trick is to do it all without risking mental instability, starting with the premise that we are not all going to Hell in a handcart. We need to believe in ourselves as part of the greater good. Adding to ‘believing’ is the need for time away from the too-many screens. True, a growing number of US adults (58 per cent) say they prefer to get their news on their digital devices but we can choose which news sources and the conditions for absorbing it.
This is how I approach any artwork: through belief and time. I believe that a large-scale or complex project can and will emerge through small, individual actions. I give myself the gift of time to focus on one stitch, one paint layer, one quilt-block, one knot, one row. Or, for the purpose of this weekly writing, one sentence at a time.
The following meandering, improvisational stitching-painting hybrid (linen on wood stretcher) was started this past spring, growing in complexity over the summer:

Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”I’m not sure if what I’m making these days reflects what I’m listening to, or if I’ve devised this improvisational way of working to allow my brain to fully concentrate on the information. I do know that this voyage of discovery is a symbiotic relationship, a positive-feedback loop that drives me to continue developing this emerging work in the studio while reaching a deeper understanding of the world beyond.
In another example, this recent exploration into redwork embroidery could have been influenced by tuning into news features on Vancouver’s global investment-induced construction boom, housing shortage, “renovictions” and homelessness.

Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”

At the time of this publishing there are 42 days of increasingly outrageous tactics before a new US president is elected. However we get there, a resting heart rate is required to see fear-mongering for what it is: just a desperate power grab.
***
*For those looking online in Canada for news that means looking elsewhere besides Facebook and Instagram, since parent company Meta chose to block their users from quality and local news instead of paying those news sources. (Google is exempt from the Online News Act after it agreed to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million a year.)

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.

Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

Awkward family moment informs art-making aesthetic

7/14/2024

When I first started out as a suburban-newspaper reporter I had a single original artwork tacked to the wall in my basement suite. It was a life-sized acrylic-on-paper, a nude holding her maybe-pregnant belly against a landscape of spewing factories and techni-coloured streams.

I watched this gaunt, world-weary figure emerge in watery brushstrokes from the hand of the newspaper photographer's girlfriend. This is how she worked, in their basement suite, pulling yardage from a large roll of cheap paper, painting straight from her head and heart, with no plan to keep or show or sell her paintings. She saw that this one resonated with me too — what twenty-something in a committed relationship doesn’t have this weighing on her mind? So she gave it to me.

Hanging it felt like supporting an ally, even if it was only hanging in my dark, featureless space that nobody would see besides the boyfriend on weekends. Then one day some of his family made the trip for a visit. They complimented my hanging flower baskets, my thrifty decor. I didn’t hear until much later that the painting had become a topic of conversation among various relatives, a bit of a joke about that subject and, by extension in my mind, this girlfriend.

I had none of the inner fortitude to see this painting or my choices as acceptable and eventually I rolled it up and hid it in a closet. I married into that family within three years. The boxed wedding dress joined the poster tube containing the offending painting for two more moves until I finally ditched the artwork at the Sally Ann. The dress is another story.

Detail from 'Unbridled,' the artist's handmade silk wedding dress embroidered with significant events. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

'I Dissent,' aesthetic design with a political position marking the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Acrylic on panel, 2020 (Carlyn Yandle)

But I did keep something from that painting: some lessons that have informed an aesthetic that I carry to this day but might not even recognize until after each artwork is completed, or is at least on its trajectory.

The first is the power of attraction. Not to be confused with the pseudoscientific Law of Attraction, this is a drive to create aesthetically-pleasing, familiar domestic objects and fields that upon closer inspection have something else to say besides cozy or pretty. An early example of one of my pretty/pretty disturbing objects is Clutch (2007). Hundreds of sewing pins were pierced into a thrifted clutch purse in a colourful beaded pattern covering the entire surface. The clasp opens to reveal an impenetrable thicket of steely pointy ends.

Another valuable lesson is context, or time and place. Gallery-goers may prepare themselves to be confronted by artwork but I don’t wish that on houseguests. There are none of those Live-Love-Laugh type directives or IKEA Eiffel Towers and tulips on the walls at home, but what is there is selected to engage, not repel. Home is a place to feel safe. The studio is a place to not play it safe, but it’s still a covert operation, playing on that first impression of domestic objects that reveal cracks in the beauty of the everyday.

I’ve also learned that my creative energy comes from joy, not pain. I have no urge to make when I barely have enough hope for the day to put on pants. Heavy realities may be the driving force but the work develops from a position of hope for comfort and social connection, a hunger for nourishment of new ideas and new materials to explore. The joy is in learning while doing, imagining new collective futures.

What first appears as a frilly white textile barely conceals the chaotic armature of conduit casing, hazard tape, metal pipes, and other construction-site debris behind layers of discarded Tyvek building wrap. (Nate Yandle photos)

Finally, my position is not fixed. In my mind I have that 1985 photo portrait of Lily Tomlin in a black T-shirt with white lettering that screams EVOLVE OR DIE. And look at her now. My sensibilities are always shifting and I am growing more at peace with the idea that what other people say about me is none of my business. When an artist friend turned 50 on an artists’ retreat the rest of us toasted her in a welcome to the I Don’t Give a Shit Club. When you’re part of that club you stop second-guessing every decision and tending to other people’s feelings first.

This is how I recently became the owner of Fuckwit. I was attracted by the sweet rosebud fabric appliqued in tiny blanket stitches precise as Letraset on a lacy linen. I like the artist's choice of font and word. It’s an overt, uncomplicated work that hangs near the front door, visible before guests would even have their coat off. If people get offended, blame the artist, not me. I just like the beauty in that crack.

Original artwork by Kathryn Lissack (@kathrynlissack)

Needling at patriotism and protest

7/7/2024

The American penchant for patriotic treats is impressive, from jelly shots to meat trays. (Instagram collage)

We all sort of forgot about celebrating Canada Day last weekend, up north, on a farm. No fireworks, no flags, no impressive array of themed party foods in the American way. That doesn't make us UnCanadian, a term that doesn't have any of the gravitas of UnAmerican. We may stand down from celebrations while remaining upstanding.

I feel a complicated gratitude about my Canadian citizenship, what with my settler-ancestors basically occupying traditional Indigenous territories. An inordinate number of maple leaf flags on a vehicle or house feels a bit aggressive and any big show of patriotism makes me itchy.

I started school in the U.S. All I remember about Kindergarten was learning to pledge allegiance to the flag while facing said flag, hand on heart, and also learning America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner. Then going home. I'm sure there were crafts but I'm thinking they were about all that too. Our rented house had American-eagle emblem wallpaper in the dining room and a flag mount at the front door. To Canadians, that's a lot of patriotism.

Instead of wringing my hands I start needling at local and global issues.

Starting back in my East Vancouver elementary school, I was far more interested in singing “God save our gracious Queen” to that portrait of the bosomy, bejewelled young Elizabeth that hung in every classroom and in the auditorium. There was O Canada too, and the Lord’s Prayer for a while. These days it's just the anthem and mostly for sporty public events but ask anyone around here and it’s a good bet they will not know the updated lyrics. (As if we need a daily reminder of the anthem, the first four notes of O Canada are blasted from a horn heard all over the city centre every day at noon.)

But what’s going on down south of this border has got my rapt attention and I’m not the only one. "Two-thirds of Canadians think the American democracy will not be able to survive another four years of Trump at the helm,” according to a January 2024 poll by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute. Further, “a Trump victory has many predicting dire consequences for both sides of the 49th parallel” with half of Canadians polled reporting they worry that the U.S. “could be on the way to becoming an authoritarian state."

I am compelled to work out these big-picture worries in a joyful kind of making. These days the source of the most relentless anxieties is the fear-mongering that stokes disinformation, anti-immigration, genderism — all the human-rights-violating -tions and -isms. Currently I'm needling at it, layering up those worries through trending heavy hashtags in a weighted blanket, part of an ongoing series of Discomforters.

But it's not all solo projects. In 2019 I joined a needling army of joyful resistors to the Trump presidency, in the Tiny Pricks Project (@tinypricksproject), curated and created by a maker in my corner of the world, Diana Weymar. Her invitation via social media to contribute to the public-engagement project resulted in a tsunami of more than 5,000 stitched sentiments. Galleries on both sides of the border were filled with Trump's angry tweets and comments rendered impotent in stitches and embellishments.

From left: A Trump quote surrounding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the @tinypricksproject, 2019. (Carlyn Yandle); detail of a gallery installation.

Being a part of that and other public craftivist projects started, for me, while living in central Mexico in the weeks leading up to the largest one-day march in American history on Washington. A grassroots social-media campaign had people all over the world taking up needles and hooks and stitching up pink pussy-hats, in comedic reference to the rape-y comments of the President-to-be. The pink sea of 2.6 million marchers on the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 remains an iconic image. It is yet to be seen which hat will be more enduring: the for-profit, mass-manufactured MAGA hat that his son-in-law claimed raised $80,000 a day during the 2016 campaign? Or the hand-stitched pussy-hats made singularly or in groups, and worn or gifted to marchers around the world?

That depends on who writes the history, and who owns the media.

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